The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
J. M. Coetzee · a novel in twenty-four chapters · Secker & Warburg, London, 1999 · scored on Coetzee’s English as published, whole, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The realist novel of the post-apartheid present, built as a series of hearings at which one man is asked to give an account of himself and gives a different one each time
Mythos
The scapegoat driven out of the city with a guilt not only his own; the fall of a Romantic outlaw, Byron’s Lucifer, to a keeper of dead dogs; the father and the daughter, the land and the stranger in the house
Phase
South Africa in the late 1990s, in the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the new university administrators and the change of dispensation
Presentation
Fiction; twenty-four numbered chapters with no parts, in a close third person and the present tense, from one centre of consciousness throughout
Register
Cold, short and exact; free indirect thought carrying irony, self-pity and learning in one line, against dialogue cut to the bone
Scale
One man, one daughter and one smallholding, with a university, a state, a history of land and the lives of animals behind them, in the length of a short novel
Governing Proposition
David Lurie, a professor in Cape Town who believes he has solved the problem of desire, seduces a student, Melanie Isaacs, pleads guilty before a committee of his university and will not make the statement of contrition it asks for. He goes to his daughter Lucy on her smallholding in the Eastern Cape, helps Bev Shaw put down unwanted dogs, and is there when the house is attacked, the dogs shot in their cages, he himself set alight and Lucy raped behind a locked door. She will not report it; she keeps the child, stays, and accepts the protection of her neighbour Petrus at the cost of her land. The wager of the novel is that a single mind, held in the present tense and never allowed to see past itself, can carry the reckoning of a country after a change of dispensation, and that the reader can be taught to read past that mind without the book once stepping out to judge it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on a man who thinks he has settled his life. David Lurie, a professor in Cape Town, has, in his own estimate, “solved the problem of sex rather well”: an arrangement with a woman called Soraya, kept within its bounds. The sentence is his, given in his idiom, and the whole book is the undoing of it. Nothing that follows is possible until that solution fails, and nothing that follows restores it.
It fails, and Lurie pursues a student, Melanie Isaacs. Byron, the poet he teaches, is the figure through whom he sees himself: the outlaw, the fallen angel, the man whose desire is its own law. He speaks of “the rights of desire” as a creed, and the book lets the phrase stand in his mouth without comment. It is the first account he gives of himself, and the most flattering.
The narration is close and in the present tense, and it never leaves him. No scene is given from any other mind: Melanie, and after her Lucy, Petrus and Bev Shaw, are seen only from outside. That is the book’s instrument. The reader has only Lurie, and must learn, from his own sentences, where his irony and the book’s part company.
Movement II
The affair becomes a complaint, and the university convenes a committee of inquiry. Lurie pleads guilty to the charge. What he will not do is make the statement the committee wants, a statement of contrition offered in public, and the hearing turns on that refusal. He will accept the sentence; he will not perform the repentance.
The scene is campus comedy, with its jargon of sensitivity and its procedures, and it is set plainly against the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the same years without becoming an allegory of it. Its disclosure is the first of the book’s three: a secular society that asks for remorse as a public performance has no means of telling remorse from compliance, and a man who refuses the performance may be the one who means it least, or most.
His standing goes, and he goes after it. The novel is built as a series of such hearings, each echoing the last, and this is the first: a demand that a man account for himself to a power he does not recognise, answered by a loss of standing. The same law will govern everything that follows, however far it seems from a committee room.
Movement III
Lurie goes to his daughter Lucy on her smallholding in the Eastern Cape. Her neighbour Petrus, who keeps the dogs, is rising toward a proprietor of land; Bev Shaw runs a clinic where unwanted animals are put down, and Lurie helps her. Then the house is attacked: the dogs are shot in their cages, Lurie is set alight in the lavatory, and Lucy is raped behind a locked door. It is terror without rhetoric, told in the same cold sentences as the committee.
Lucy will not report the rape. She keeps the child, stays on the land, and enters Petrus’s protection at the cost of the land itself. Her refusals are lines of a few words, and the book gives no chapter to her reasons: she is behind the locked door still. To begin again from nothing, she says, “Like a dog”, the words with which Kafka’s The Trial closes, turned from a death to a life.
Here the second disclosure is made: after a change of dispensation, history may be paid in bodies and land by those who did not incur it, and a woman may accept the payment as a reckoning her father cannot understand. Whether Petrus knew, and why she stays, the form will not say. The book was read by some as a racist picture of the new country, and argued over long and in public; the withholding is the point of that quarrel and of the book.
Movement IV
Lurie returns to Cape Town, and then goes to the Isaacs family in George. There, before Mrs Isaacs and her daughter Desiree, he kneels. It is the act the committee asked for and did not get, made in private, unasked, before the people he wronged. Set against the refusal in the committee room, it shows what the book holds about repentance: that it is not a statement, and cannot be compelled.
Through all of this he has been composing an opera on Byron, and it changes as he does. Teresa, young in his first conception, becomes Teresa aged; and a banjo comes into the music he hears. It is the most removable material in the book, and some of it is summary of what Lurie hears rather than music made; but it carries the turn in him from desire to care, and it obeys the book’s one law.
The structure, by place, is Cape Town, the Eastern Cape, Cape Town and George, and the Eastern Cape again: each a hearing, each a different account. The professor’s self-image as a Romantic outlaw has been taken from him a piece at a time, and what is left is a man who can kneel, and who is about to find the one office still open to him.
Movement V
Back in the Eastern Cape, Lurie works at the clinic. When the euthanised dogs are taken to the hospital incinerator, he takes them himself, so that the bodies are not beaten stiff by the workers, and he does it for no reason he can give. This is the third disclosure: the care of animals in their deaths as the last place left to a man stripped of standing, and something close to the sacred in the care of dead bodies.
In the last scene he carries into the surgery a young dog he has grown fond of. “Yes, I am giving him up.” The creature given up, the life ended with care: the scapegoat of the book, the old order’s guilt laid on him and carried out of the city, ends not in expiation but in this small office done well.
The present tense keeps the end open. There is no later Lurie to say what the act meant, whether love, surrender or penance, and the book does not decide. That withholding, with Lucy’s and with Petrus’s, is why it has been argued over for twenty-seven years without being settled, and why the reader, taught to read past Lurie, is left at the surgery door with him.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see. The opening, with its economy of desire that Lurie believes he has solved, cannot go, for the whole book is the undoing of that solution. The affair with Melanie, the committee, the attack, the clinic, the visit to George and the opera are each required by the argument: each is a hearing at which Lurie is asked to account for himself and gives a different account. The book is short and its scenes are rationed. A hostile reader could take out some of the opera in its middle stretch, where the shift from Teresa young to Teresa aged is argued at length in Lurie’s head, and one or two of the later Cape Town scenes. These are small. The scale is compelled, though not every paragraph bears weight as in the tightest short novels.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The highest of the twelve, level with two others. The disclosure is articulated, and holds in three parts. A secular society that asks for repentance as a public performance cannot tell remorse from compliance: Lurie pleads guilty to the committee and refuses the statement it wants, and the book sets that refusal against his later private kneeling before Mrs Isaacs and her daughter. After a change of dispensation, history may be paid in bodies and land by those who did not incur it: Lucy’s choice is shown as a reckoning she accepts and her father cannot understand. And the care of animals in their deaths is the last place left to a man stripped of standing. One of the three is carried by withholding, for Lucy’s own account is refused by design, and part of the truth is stated as a refusal.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The lowest of the twelve. The register is cold and exact, and the book rises rarely; when it rises it rises high. The shooting of the dogs in their cages and the burning of Lurie’s scalp are terror without rhetoric. The finest elevation is quieter: Lurie taking the bodies of the euthanised dogs to the hospital incinerator himself, so that they are not beaten stiff by the workers, doing it for no reason he can give; and the last scene, in which he carries the young dog he has grown fond of into the surgery. Lucy’s “Like a dog”, taken from the close of Kafka’s The Trial and turned to a life begun again from nothing, is the other height. What holds the axis here is frequency: the heights are few and spaced, and the prose’s refusal of uplift is its method.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The archetypal structure is built, not only evoked. The scapegoat is enacted in the plot: the old order’s guilt is laid on one aging white man and on his daughter, and carried out of the city. The fall is built through Byron and his Lucifer: the Romantic outlaw is Lurie’s self-image, and his talk of “the rights of desire” is that figure’s creed, and the book drives him from it to a keeper of dead dogs. The dog of the last scene is myth made particular, the creature given up and the life ended with care. Father and daughter, the land, the stranger in the house: the patterns bear weight. The axis stands on the line of the gate and no higher because the archetype is pressed through an ironist’s consciousness, and the book keeps its distance from the deep it builds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the South African novel of conscience, of Gordimer, Paton and Brink, and Coetzee’s own earlier allegories, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K and Foe. Disgrace turns from allegory to an apparently plain realism of the present, and from the novel of conscience to one that will not tell the reader where conscience lies: the white victim of a rape that is not reported, the black neighbour whose part in it is never settled, a protagonist neither redeemed nor condemned. The stake was real: the book was read by some as a racist representation of the new South Africa, and the quarrel was long and public. But the turn is made inside the realist novel and inside Coetzee’s own ironic method; the form itself is not remade. A turn of real cost within a known mode.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Level with the highest. Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The single centre of consciousness is the instrument: there is only Lurie, his mind’s commentary running on in the present tense, so the reader cannot enter Lucy or Petrus, and the book’s central questions, why she stays and what Petrus knew, are unanswerable because the form will not let a man of Lurie’s kind answer them. Give Lucy a chapter and the book becomes a lesser one that explains her. The present tense removes the retrospective narrator who might have learned: there is no later Lurie to judge the earlier. The free indirect style lets his irony and the book’s coincide and then part, so the reader learns to read past him. Form and knowledge are one.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Twenty-seven years of heavy return. It is among the most taught and argued English novels of its decade, at the centre of debates on post-apartheid writing, the ethics of reading, secular confession, rape and its representation, and the lives of animals, beside Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals of the same year. Derek Attridge’s J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004) is one landmark of that return. The book is not exhausted because its central withholding, Lucy’s reasons, Petrus’s part, the meaning of Lurie’s last act, sustains incompatible readings that the text does not decide among. Against it: much of the return is moral and political argument about what the book permits, and its formal depth, real, is less various than that of the longest-lived novels. The evidence is of decades, not yet of generations.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the novel in English of the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book changed what the South African novel after 1994 could be, from a novel of resistance to one of reckoning without consolation, and set the terms in which the end of white standing could be written. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide in criticism and teaching, and particular in two fields, as a reference text for the post-apartheid writing that followed and the case on which much of the argument over representing the new South Africa was fought, and as a founding novel of literary animal studies beside The Lives of Animals. It made Coetzee the first writer to win the Booker twice and stood close behind his Nobel of 2003: presence, not reach. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that no run of later novels it redirected can be named with certainty.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Twenty-seven years are weighed as twenty-seven. The text survives whole and in print without a break, translated widely, set on syllabuses in many countries, and adapted to film: the widest presence for its age, which earns the top of what that age allows. Its surface is tied to a moment, the South Africa of the late 1990s, the language of the commission and of the new university administrators; but the book has already outlived that moment’s arguments and reads now as a work about authority, desire and its loss rather than as a report. It goes no higher because twenty-seven years cannot outscore a century: survival is demonstrated for a generation, and the rest is still to be shown.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Level with the highest. Command of English prose at a high pitch of economy. The sentences are short, exact and cold, and the free indirect style carries Lurie’s irony, self-pity and learning in the same line without the narrator ever stepping out to judge. Dialogue is cut to the bone and does much of the work: in the exchanges with Lucy after the attack, each refusal of hers is a line of a few words, as hard as anything in the modern English novel. The structure is a series of hearings, each echoing the last, and the motifs, dogs, the opera, the banjo, the scapegoat, are placed with no wasted turn. The charge, and what holds it below 9: the economy is so sure that it becomes one instrument in one register, and some opera passages summarise what Lurie hears rather than make it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the campus comedy of the committee, with its jargon of sensitivity and its request for a statement, and the violence on the Eastern Cape smallholding, the burning and the rape. One law governs both: each is a demand that a man account for himself to a power he does not recognise, and each answers him with a loss of standing. The opera, which looks like ornament, obeys the same law, moving from Byron’s desire to the aging Teresa and a banjo, as Lurie’s own desire moves to care. The range is wide for a short book: satire, horror, pastoral and something close to devotion. The charge is that the single consciousness narrows the field: coherence is partly secured by having only one mind to cohere.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many, and held in one structure: one man’s consciousness; the family, father and daughter and the daughter’s coming child; sexuality and its claimed rights; the university and the state’s new forms of accountability; land, labour and property, in Petrus’s rise from the man who keeps the dogs to a proprietor; race and history after apartheid; violence; art, in the opera; animals and death; and something near the sacred in the care of dead bodies. They are integrated, not listed: Petrus’s gaining of the land and Lucy’s pregnancy are one event seen from history and from the family. What holds the axis there is the short form and its single eye: the state, labour and the lives of the black characters are seen only through Lurie’s narrowing sight, which is the book’s point and also its bound.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Made, each at 8.9, then The Inner Law at 8.8. A disclosure in three parts that can be stated and holds, of public repentance, of history paid in land and bodies, and of care at the edge of death; a single present-tense consciousness that is the instrument of the book’s knowledge, so that what it cannot see is what the book knows; English prose at a high pitch of economy, with dialogue cut to the bone; and one law, the demand that a man account for himself, governing a committee room and a burning house alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.3, then The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed, each at 8.4. The book rises high but rarely, its refusal of uplift being its method; its turn from allegory to realism is made inside a known form and its own author’s ironic manner; its reach in later fiction can be named only in general; and what it holds is seen through one narrowing eye, so that the state, labour and the lives of the black characters stay at the edge of the frame.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it on the line at 8.5, its myth built in the plot but pressed through an ironist’s consciousness; but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short, a turn of real cost made within the realist novel and Coetzee’s own method, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short, its reach wide in criticism and in two fields but not traceable with certainty through a run of later novels. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Sublime at 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the novel is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, first published by Secker & Warburg, London, in 1999, and awarded the Booker Prize that year. It is scored as the novel as published, whole, in twenty-four numbered chapters with no parts. It was written in English, so there is no question of translation: every axis is judged on Coetzee’s own sentences. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The plot, the persons, the narrative method and the argument are known closely; the wording of the prose is not. English is quoted only where the words are certain: “solved the problem of sex rather well”, “the rights of desire”, “Like a dog” and “Yes, I am giving him up”; everything else is paraphrase. Named as history: Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe and The Lives of Animals; Gordimer, Paton and Brink; Byron; Kafka’s The Trial; Derek Attridge’s J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004). Matters that could not be verified, among them the page count of the first edition, the share of dialogue in the text, whether the book names the scapegoat in Lurie’s words, which poem of Byron he teaches, the date and form of a political submission against the book and its author’s later removal from South Africa, and the year and cast of the film, are not given.